The Paterian Bildungsroman Reenvisioned: "Brain-Building" in Alison Bechdel's <i>Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic</i>

Abstract

In Walter Pater's imaginary portrait The Child in the House, the material decor of the childhood home is so fundamental to the protago nist's inner development that its influence is literalized in the interweav ing of external material surfaces with the internal consciousness of the protagonist, Florian Deleal. Pater's semiautobiographical narrative is a compressed example of a particular strain of the Late Victorian Bildung sroman in which the childhood home is figured as a primary force in the development of the child's aesthetic awareness, a trope that has reemerged more recently in Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,3 While Bechdel's thoroughly postmodern memoir would at first seem an unlikely venue for the resurfacing of Late Victorian literary forms, as we shall see, the hybrid nature of comics, which itself effects an interweaving of the external spatial world with the internal thoughts of the protagonist into an inextricable texture, is a fitting medium for representing contemporary forms of aesthetic education. Insofar as Fun Home maps chronologically the formation of the art ist/author's aesthetic and intellectual sensibilities, we might say that Bechdel's autobiography follows the traditional narrative trajectory of